


Mnemorable

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Body Horror, Community: spook_me, Gen, Ghosts, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 04:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2534438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early days of the war, Tumbler is working on his dream to become a mnemosurgeon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mnemorable

It was never quiet in a relinquishment clinic. That was one of the first things Tumbler had learned, in this half-shadowed apprenticeship. It was never completely silent, and you never felt entirely alone: there was always some sound, clicks or hisses of the refrigerants, the sub-aural buzz of the white noise vacuum, and a kind of faint murmur that Lobe had dismissed, with an elegant wave, as a mere resonance hallucination: sounds ricocheting off each other's sine edges, and nothing more.  
It was never quiet, and it never felt at ease. But maybe that was Tumbler projecting.

He knew Prowl wouldn't approve: Prowl was a strict Functionist, and changing his function to mnemosurgery was about as close to blasphemy as his atheist partner could imagine.

But he'd done it anyway, taking his nights off and slipping down here, learning the hard way, the slow way, menial tasks firsts. At first, he'd simply cleaned the place up, swabbing up spilled fluids, wiping down tables, sterilizing equipment. He remembered holding his first set of injectors, almost longingly, wishing so intensely that he had the mods to use them that his stubby, blunt hands burned. He'd turned them over and over in his hands, his flat, dumb, Security mech's hands, until Trepan had caught him, flicking the light on to flood over the scene, his mouth curved in a knowing smile, the exact angle and edge of the reciprocating saws they used for the body swaps.

That was where he was now, what he'd worked up to: the body swap ward. New hands, with the basic injectors. Simple stuff, and he was good at it, but still, it was unsettling, if he was honest about it. He didn't have Trepan's detachment. Or Prowl's. Prowl saw everyone as a potential criminal, and the needy and the desperate rode just that much closer to breaking the edge. And Trepan saw them as income, nothing more. Tumbler didn’t know how he felt: he just liked doing his job, using his new hands.

It was a sort of slavery, the way it worked, if he thought about it. Legal slavery, though, or else Security would have busted these places down to the ground. Prowl had said once that it was a good thing, it at least gave the poor some options, some choice to be useful.

Tumbler wondered if he’d ever seen a clinic up close.

He'd been excited, his first day here, sure he was going to learn his new craft, his vocation. And more.  This could be the Institute. What a perfect place to hide it, wouldn't it? But he'd searched, and searched and listened, and found nothing.  Just the dull routine of paperwork and cleaning. 

At least at this RC, the one Tumbler knew, was on the level. Mechs signed the forms, and got stripped of their frames. If the frame got rented out enough times, to make enough profit, they were thawed, their spark essence pulled from the vacuum, and reinserted. If not, they could languish there indefinitely, teetering ever closer to signal blur, to fading out into the static.

High stakes gambling, Trepan had joked. And all they won if they did 'win' was a body that was battered, dented, and in far worse shape than when they'd dropped it off.

Like this one, Tumbler thought, moving among the darkened racks. It was night shift, one of the ways he squeezed this in with his regular job, and he was still getting used to the place. But he’d learned the layout, found himself pacing through the rackrooms, filled with husks, frames to be rented, like this one: A junker's body, primer painted and ungainly, but high class mechs from the tier-cities found it irresistible, inflicting circuit boosters and self-mutilation. He was close, close to making his free-tab. What would he think when he rewoke in his body? What would he think about the new scars, the new welds, the scorches and dents?

Not my problem, Tumbler said to himself, trying to gather Trepan’s dispassion. Not my problem: he signed the forms. He’d agreed to it all.

Still….

“Bad time to develop a conscience,” Lobe had joked, when Tumbler had hesitated, over his first pullout. He’d read the steps, had practiced it in his mind about a hundred times--more, if you consider all the times he’d dreamed of doing it--but when he’d stood over his first relinquishment, it had felt...wrong. It had felt like killing, eventhough there were redundant protocols to keep Rossum’s Trinity intact. The mech would live--well, his consciousness would--but still it felt...wrong.

Tumbler had shaken his head, as though he could toss the upsetting thought right out of his brain module. “Nah,” he bluffed. “Just want to, you know, commemorate the moment.”

“The real fun,” Lobe said, “begins when you start doing the swaps. Do these enough and, you know, manage not to frag anyone up, and you’ll get a shot.”

He’d gotten his shot. And he’d seen a glimpse of the cockiness, the self-assurance, of both Lobe and Trepan, because it was an intoxicating kind of power, to install a new system into a body, to activate the reboot sequence, and watch. Watch the optics open, watch the hands move, unsteady and awkward at first, watch the sense of wonder cross the newly reawakened face. It was power, almost over life and death. The mnemosurgeon giveth, the mnemosurgeon taketh away.

Tumbler patted the body, feeling the matte dullness of its stripped armor under his hands. Volunteers, he told himself, repeating Lobe’s favorite mantra. They were all volunteers.

A dull thoom shook the building, and the hand he had on the body’s leg curled into a clutch.

Just artillery, he told himself, as the thoom was followed by a distant chittering of small arms.

It’s just artillery. It’s just the Senate’s forces taking down some of those insurgents. They fought dirty, these people who called themselves Decepticons. Yeah, sure, thingswere kind of uneven in society, but if you were smart, you could find a way. Tumbler believed that. Frag, he was living it, right now, behind the relinquishment clinic’s heavy walls. All you had to do was be willing to take a little risk, his own sort of gambling.

Another rumble, like distant thunder. The attacks were getting worse, he thought. More frequent, bolder, moving more and more into cities. Like they didn’t believe in the Registration Act. Silly. Better to get an actual voice than to set themselves as bad guys.

“Prowl’s gonna be busy tonight,” he said, almost just to hear his own voice, something to break through the rumble and mechanical hum of this place, to make a sound that sounded alive. Prowl was probably heading toward the station already, right now, and the fact he was off shift be damned.

The building seemed to shift, the sounds receding for a klik. Lights flickered, just as another explosion rattled the ground, and sound seemed to fall away entirely. It took Tumbler a few moments to realize that it wasn’t just some deafness caused by the explosion. Dust filtered down from the ceiling, shaken loose, powdering his helm and shoulders, but that was all.

Sound returned, a thin whine from the vacuum chamber, the bleat of something like an alarm.

Tumbler ran back through the body rooms, past line after line, row after row, of relinquished frames, unwanted bodies, rent-and-dents, as Lobe called them.

The door whisked open in front of him, leading to the large central column, balanced on an electromagnetic cushion. The white-noise vacuum, but it was off-pitch somehow, resonating with a sharp whine instead of its usual hum. The room felt on edge, agitated.

“Projecting,” Tumbler said. Just projecting. But his voice seemed to clatter against the whine of the room, which seemed to twist in pitch, a whine becoming one of those sounds that started to rattle at the back of his neck. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

Another rumble, and the floor seemed to buck under his feet. Tumbler’s hands flung out, grabbing at a console to steady himself, as the lights blinked, flared, and then went out.

“...scrap.” It felt bad, suddenly, and Tumbler figured it must be the sound, which was skirling around the chamber, ringing and redoubling on itself, shimmering in the air, murmuring over itself, like voices.

Tumbler fumbled in the dark, trying to find one of the consoles. Emergency lights. There should be emergency lights. There should be something. Why wasn’t it?

  
_“....elp. lost. where am. are. nothing. who. dead. am I de--. backi’llgetitbacki’llget. need to hide. won’t find. can’t fi--.”_ The words were a jumble, tumbling and clawing over each other, wanting, needing to be heard, spinning themselves from the reverberations of sound. But worse was the despair, something purple grey and almost palpable, choking the air, like claws of smoke, blinding, stinging his optics.

Tumbler flailed, one hand striking a table, fingers helplessly slapping keys.

_“--one of them. he’s one of them. baaaaaack. put me baaaaaaa-- i don’t know who i am anymore who am i who am i who am--”_

The sounds converged around him, despairing cresting over into anger, as though registering the mnemoinjectors on his fingers, the programming in his brain module. They felt...hungry, angry, empty, wanting to be filled, hollownesses that burned like scorched-out optical orbits.

Another explosion shook the building, dust filtering down from the ceiling, and Tumbler could hear a crack, now, as though the ground itself was splitting, and the whine rose to a screech, the voices rising in pitch like a hurricane swirling around him.

He ran.

Maybe it was cowardice, but he didn’t care. He ran, feet pounding the ground that seemed to lurch and jump under his strides.

A wall collided with his face, his faceplate bruising up against him, sending stars through his field of vision. He had...no idea where he was. It some place, black and impenetrable as used oil. And they were still after him, slow, like a cyclone inching over the ground, but he could hear the fury in the sound, now, that he’d run, that he’d escaped, and he could get whispers in his mind, already, of what they’d do, what they could do, to him: rent with ghostly fingers, his mind clawed into tatters, filled with a host of homeless minds, broken sparks, the gibbering lost.

He felt a port, with slots for fingers, and he jammed his shaking hand in, feeling his injectors activate, like some kind of key, and the wall in front of him whispered open, a hidden door, and behind it the chartreuse glow of emergency lights.

He pushed through, stumbling over...something, knocking what looked like a pile of rails to the ground. He winced, shoulders nearly up to his audio, at the thunderous clatter. If there was any doubt where he had gone to hide, he’d just given that away.

“Scrap!” The curse echoed in the last clattering, as he probed forward, optics peering at the green glow of the emergency lighting. He could feel them coming after him, seeping around the edges of the closed door, or just...somehow...pushing through the wall itself, reaching diaphanous shapes like gnarled, hideous fingers, toward him.

He could feel the hunger, like a smell wafting off it, rancid and dusty. He scrambled, nearly falling over the still-rolling rails, feet thudding unevenly down the room, feeling the...things chasing him--what were they, anyway? disembodied sparks, the minds and spirits of the rent-and-dents. They were coming after him, and he was fleeing as fast as he could, deep into this unknown part of the Clinic.

A dense clang sent a bolt of fear through him as he ran. They could touch things. They could move things, too. He was fragged. Fragged. He was here alone and they were chasing him and wanted him dead and he couldn’t outrun them and they were catching up and--

His hip slammed into something, a bin, or crate, and tipped over. He couldn’t get free, falling with it, tipping the contents over onto him, pelting him.  
...with faces. Jaws and orbits and nasal projections and faces in all expressions of fear and terror and shock and agony. The faces seemed to keep falling, as though they were all tumbling down an endless well, face after face hitting him, hating him, recrimination pinging off the edges.

He felt hands, things, reaching through the endless fall of faces, grabbing him. “Oh Primus! Primus no!!!” he heard himself scream, his voice crackling with terror, hands batting uselessly at the hands he could swear he felt on him, and they were on him and they had him and his whole

                                               world

was

                                                                                                                                            going

 

 

 

black.

***

“Prowl?” His voice sounded scratchy, and the bright sterile lights of a medibay scraped his optics. But that was Prowl, his face stonily impassive, trying too hard to be unmoved, as he nodded. “How long--what--?”

Prowl shook his head, cutting off the questions. Not that Tumbler was up to making a coherent one, anyway. “You were apparently responding to the alarm. Part of a Relinquishment Clinic subsided in the attack. You were brought here by two...technicians.” He said the last word with distaste. He never did like the Clinics, no matter how tidy they were with their paperwork.

"One of them is out there," Prowl added, red chevrons tipping toward the door. He could see--Trepan, the name floated to him. Trepan.  Waiting, chitchatting with a medic, the sly look of two mechs sharing shop talk. 

It made no sense. That wasn’t what had happened at all.

Had it?

He blinked, trying to remember, but all he could recall was a sense of falling. And screaming. He struggled to sit up, the room lurching heavily from side to side. His whole body hurt, but the worst of it was the back of his head, where he could swear...

...he felt drill holes.


End file.
